Monday, February 13, 2023
Why it is so difficult to tackle climate change
Life begins with a single cell, and is a journey from life to death to renewal. Not dust to dust, but soil that nurtures life to soil. Destroy that diversity, and we destroy ourselves as part of that diversity
Sixty years ago, the Club of Rome’s report “Limits to Growth” already projected how human activity was going to change the planet, heating up the climate through carbon emissions that would raise the sea level, change weather and damage food, water and natural resources.
Since most people do not understand how their individual activities change the planet, scientists worked hard to provide more evidence, but economists thought they had a perfect market solution. If carbon markets can be created to price carbon costs and benefits, emitters could pay those who are willing to sequester carbon at the right price. Unfortunately, carbon markets are still nascent in most countries and are so fragmented that their impact is limited. People don’t trade carbon if they don’t understand it.
Dealing with climate change is a complex system change. This is tough because everyone is connected or interdependent in this complex world. This leads to “collective action traps”. Human beings find it difficult to work together because of different values, objectives and circumstances. Each expects the other to act, whereas if all do not cooperate, nothing will change. Like a network of individuals bound to each other, one virus can take the whole network down. This inability to act is called Tragedy of the Commons, because individuals for their selfish action, destroy the commons, or what is considered public good.
When the corporate world adopts ESG (environment, society and governance) standards to improve corporate social responsibility (CSR), it forgets that all three are entangled. Fundamentally, poor human governance is actually the evil that creates environmental destruction and social injustices.
There are essentially three broad categories of governance – state, market, or civil society (communities – the smallest being the family). State institutions are essentially hierarchical, top-down governance, with siloed bureaucracies that often work against each other for their own interests. Profit-driven market organizations end up being highly concentrated with monopolistic or oligopolistic control over their consumers and workers. Civil societies or communities are more flexible, but at the micro or small end often suffer from lack of fair access to funding and incur higher transactions costs than larger multinationals.
United Nations Special Envoy on Climate Action Mark Carney identified what he called the Tragedy of Horizon, namely, people cannot cooperate because of different time horizons. Profit-motivated companies are reluctant to cut carbon emissions because they involve additional costs. Corporate quarterly and annual financial reporting cycles mean that CEOs whose bonuses are tied to short-term profits decline long-term investments for the future.
Similarly, few politicians in a democracy will make very tough decisions for the long-term because they all face electoral cycles of not more than 4-5 years. In seeking popularity, they will not act to inflict pain through tougher regulations or higher taxes. The tragedy of horizons almost guarantees that long-term or public interests will be sacrificed for short-term gain.
All these explain why governments and corporations find it hard to change. However, communities (either urban or rural) that face the consequences of climate change, such as those hurt by wild forest fires, rising seas, food shortages, water pollution, etc. are more driven to work together when they identify common threats. The bottom-up approach works better because those who are most directly affected by climate threats have a common fate and therefore are incentivized to work together to meet these challenges. On the other hand, governments and corporations are hierarchical, divided into top-down bureaucracies that have few incentives to work together because each seeks to deliver partial results for their own vested interests.
The tragedy of horizons reveals a fundamental mismatch of different cycles. What goes around must come around – meaning that there are consequences for any action. Agricultural communities work together because planting any crop works in cycles and seasons. You cannot rely on too much chemical fertilizers or pesticides without polluting or poisoning the crops. Grain crops like rice and wheat or vegetables can be planted once or twice a year. Fruit trees and trees cultivated for their wood have cycles that last decades, since the former may take four-five years before they bear fruit and commercial forests may take much longer, requiring planned cutting, planting, and re-planting. Indigenous farmers know that you cannot rely on mono-crops, which kill the soil and that diverse crops, as well as crop rotation would regenerate the soil.
The real barrier in tackling climate change is therefore high population Homo Sapiens, a species that has grown to become a monoculture that is killing biodiversity through overconsumption of natural resources. Indigenous people have always lived with nature. Life is a cycle from dust to dust, but death returns our physical body to the soil, so that micro-bacteria, viruses and fungi replenish the soil from which other plants, worms and life regenerate. Tackling climate warming and biodiversity cannot be two separate tracks, as is being done through COP27 in Egypt and COP15 on biodiversity in Toronto.
The unity of complex systems within complex systems is through cycles linking different parts, just as ocean and air currents circulate like Nina weather effects that impact on rain, thunderstorms and fish and farm growth.
By discovering fossil fuels, which are after all carbonized energy deposits of previously living things, humanity has used these to power its domination over the rest of mankind and other living things, destroying biodiversity wantonly.
When individuals, communities, corporations and states want to deal with climate action, they only have to look in the mirror to see the major culprits. Until we become aware that we, the collective humanity, are the ultimate threat to our own existence, through either nuclear war or wanton waste of what nature provided, we will never stop climate warming.
Life begins with a single cell, and is a journey from life to death to renewal. Not dust to dust, but soil that nurtures life to soil. Destroy that diversity, and we destroy ourselves as part of that diversity.
Andrew Sheng
Source: The Statesman, 11/02/23
The Indian ease with translation and multilingualism: GANESH DEVY
I grew up in a small town named Bhor in Pune district. Bhor was a one-time“Princely State”, but the prince was really a minor prince. Among thearchitecturally interesting “monuments” he created out of his negligible revenuewere a small palace, a temple, a high school, and a library. As a middle-schoolstudent, I used to go to the library. It had a few thousand books, mostly in Marathi.Among them, many were translations of English, European, and Bangla books.
Among the translations were a biography of Abraham Lincoln, a translation ofVictor Hugo’s
Les Miserables
, a prose rendering of one of Alfred Tennyson’s poems,and the Tarzan stories. I was not aware that they were translations. It did notstrike me at that age, but to bring a book from the US or France or Africa tomonolingual readers in a small town inhabited by people who had rarely evercrossed the borders of their State was quite a miracle.
A few years later, when I started reading newspapers, I wondered how the Marathireporters could get the details of things happening all over the world so fast. I wasnot aware that the editorial desks had to depend on translation of news in otherlanguages, mainly English. I had not realised how important a role the invisibletranslators play in the spread of information and culture. And it was not just thespread of information but also the spread of empires where they played a key role.
The dubhashis
I do not know if enough documentary evidence exists to support the story I haveheard about the fi rst encounter between offi cers of the East India Company andthe people in Surat where the EIC wanted to begin its trading operations. It seemsthe Englishmen, who obviously did not know either Gujarati or Persian, had toemploy Armenian translators. The Englishmen knew some Portuguese; theArmenians also understood Portuguese.
Thus an English sentence was translated fi rst into Portuguese, then thePortuguese was translated into Armenian, followed by its Persian translation fromArmenian, and fi nally the Persian was translated into Gujarati. In reply to thecommunication, the whole chain of translations was played back. Yet, despite thislong linguistic journey along the path of translation, the communication did takeplace.
I often wonder if the European powers could have built their colonial empires ifthat anonymous translator had not come to their rescue. Later, the Company
2/10/23, 11:08 AM The Indian ease with translation and multilingualism - Frontline
https://frontline.thehindu.com/columns/india-this-side-ganesh-devy-learnt-in-translation-on-the-indian-ease-with-translation-and-multilingualism/art… 3/6
created an offi cial position of dubhashis or multilingual functionaries. Twocenturies later, the EIC offi cials were fi rst trained in a few Indian languages beforebeing posted to India. By the end of the 18th century, many of them translatedtexts from Persian and Sanskrit into English. Some, like Sir William Jones (1746-1794) and Charles Wilkins (1749-1836), became world famous.
Over the last fi ve decades, I have come across innumerable scholars andenthusiasts who have translated from or into their own languages. In comparison,the numbers of those interested in translation in England or in other English-speaking countries is much smaller. I often think of poets like A.K. Ramanujan,Dilip Chitre, and Arun Kolatkar, whose ease with several languages wasremarkable, as being characteristic of the Indian attitude to language andliterature. Ramanujan translated from Tamil and Kannada into English. He wrotehis poems in English as well as in Kannada. Chitre had an ease with translation andwriting both in English and Marathi. When I was in Gujarat, I translated a fewcomplex texts from Gujarati to English. I have also translated from Marathi toEnglish and from English to Marathi without becoming too self-conscious.Besides, when it came to writing in Gujarati, Marathi, and English, I did notexperience any great unease.
This is not to say that one has complete mastery over all these languages. The fewexamples I have given are brought in to point to the sense of ease that Indianshave in dealing with several languages. Millions of workers and traders in Indiawho work in States other than their own engage with several languages as easily asfi sh swim in water. We can perhaps say that the Indian Consciousness is aTranslating Consciousness.
“What myths describe as “Parakaya-prvesh” (getting under another’sskin), is a way of life for us.”
Metamorphosis, or what myths describe as
Parakaya-prvesh
(getting underanother’s skin), is seen as no great deal by Indians who are used to beingmultilingual. It is a way of life for us. It is an important soft power India hasinherited, the importance of which we have not fully assessed.
Fortunately, we have a long tradition of considering translations as equally sacredas the original texts. We also have an amazing diversity of languages which makesmultilingualism a natural cultural practice. The convention of bestowing a sacredstatus on translations emerges in the circumstances under which many of ourmodern languages were born.
2/10/23, 11:08 AM The Indian ease with translation and multilingualism - Frontline
https://frontline.thehindu.com/columns/india-this-side-ganesh-devy-learnt-in-translation-on-the-indian-ease-with-translation-and-multilingualism/art… 4/6
Most of them have translations of Sanskrit texts such as the Mahabharata or theRamayana as the fi rst or early texts in the initial phase of their emergence. The
Jnaneshwari
for Marathi, the
Gita Govinda
for Oriya, the
Charyas
in Assamiya, theMahabharata translations in Telugu and Kannada and the
Ramcharitamanas
forHindi exemplify this peculiar phenomenon. These texts are as sacred for thespeakers of those languages as the King James version of the Bible is forEnglishmen.
Language diversity
As far as language diversity is concerned, data on “Mother Tongues” in successiveCensus reports may suffi ce. The 1961 Census had listed 1,652 mother tongues asreported by Indian citizens. In 2011, 1,369 mother tongues were reported. The highdensity of languages in India provides a favourable social context for anyone toaccept bilingualism or even multilingualism as a natural way of life. In turn,multilingualism supports translation as a mental habit in day-to-day life. Theenormous advantage that such a society has over a purely monolingual societyshould not be underestimated.
When I grew up reading Marathi translations of books from many countries, Hindiwas not an easily understood language in Maharashtra. Later, the popularity ofHindi fi lms and Hindi songs brought Hindi closer to the Marathi-speaking people.During the same period, the Marathi language kept distancing itself fromnumerous tribal languages in Maharashtra and either marginalised them or plainfi nished them off. I have noticed a similar process in Gujarati during the last sixdecades.
At this juncture in our national history, Hindi is being presented as the linguistic“Big Brother”. An insistence on displaying Hindi signboards in southern States isthe beginning of an intended diminishing of Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, andMalayalam. The Language Committee’s recommendation that Hindi be made thelanguage of inter-State offi cial communication in the name of national unity is anill-advised step towards linguistic social engineering. It may look like a desirablemove for a myopic nationalism, but it will spell the beginning of the decline ofIndia’s multilingualism and inherent translation ability. It will, in simple words,erode the soft power that our ancestors have handed down to us.
Recently, I was in Chennai for the International Book Fair organised by the TamilNadu Textbook and Educational Services Corporation. The fair attractedparticipation from a large number of publishers from various continents. I learntthat plans are afoot to have a number of Tamil works translated into several Indianlanguages, English, and other global languages. I fi nd this an extremely imaginative
2/10/23, 11:08 AM The Indian ease with translation and multilingualism - Frontline
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cultural move. It is bound to increase the prestige of Tamil the world over. Besides,it will strengthen the age-old institution of translators.
To my mind, the BJP’s ham-handed imposition of Hindi and the DMK’s imaginativestrategy to increase its soft power stand in sharp contrast. One betrays impatienceand inadequate understanding of India’s cultural past, the other showsstatesmanship and a good grasp of the cultural make-up of India. After all, the onlyNobel Prize for Literature given to any Indian was for a translation, RabindranathTagore’s Bangla
Gitanjali
in its English version.
The ability to translate, transform, and transmigrate and the ability to get underanother’s skin with complete empathy, which are at the heart of India’s culture andpast, cannot be easily understood by an ideology that thinks of every “other” as anenemy within. The working of the invisible hand cannot be grasped by those whobelieve that hands are made only for wielding lathis.
Ganesh Devy is a cultural activist and founder of Dakshinayana.
Source; Frontline Magazine, 24/02/23
Friday, February 10, 2023
Quote of the Day February 10, 2023
“The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.”
Theodore Roosevelt
“लोगों के साथ सामंजस्य स्थापित कर पाना ही सफ़लता का एक अति महत्त्वपूर्ण सूत्र है।”
थियोडोर रूसवेल्ट
Report: WhatsApp is India’s most accessible app for PWDs
The Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy is a think tank that does legal research. The organization recently released a report on the popularity of software applications in India. The title of the report is “Making the Digital Ecosystem Disabled Friendly”. The organization has found that WhatsApp is the most accessible app for disabled persons.
About the report
The organization evaluated applications in different categories such as e-commerce, online payments, transport, food delivery, etc. The report was generated based on the web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
What is WCAG?
The WCAG was created by Web Accessibility Initiative. It was launched by W3C, World Wide Web Consortium. The W3C is the main key to WWW (World Wide Web). The headquarters of the org is in the USA. The main objective of W3C is to create web standards.
Other apps audited
The think tank also audited other apps such as OLA, UBER, TELEGRAM, FLIPKART, AMAZON, ZOMATO, SWIGGY, PAYTM, PHONE PE, etc.
After auditing, the apps were categorized as “highly accessible”, “moderately accessible”, and “less accessible”. WhatsApp was highly accessible.
ASI Keeladi Report: Sangam Age pushed to 800 BCE
Keeladi is a hamlet located near Madurai city in Tamil Nadu. It is along the banks of River Vaigai. The ASI started its excavations in Keeladi in 2014. Evidence was found that the civilization at Keeladi, that is, the Sangam Age civilization is older than thought before. Earlier it was believed that Sangam Era was 300 BCE. But the excavations at Keeladi revealed that Sangam Era was older and dated 800 BCE. Controversies arose with the new findings. Today, the ASI has put an end to the controversies finalizing that Sangam Age dates from 800 BCE.
What is the issue?
ASI conducts excavations in four to five phases. During the Keeladi excavations, consecutive phases did not receive funds on time. Also, the Tamil archaeologists working with ASI performing the excavations were transferred to Assam and other states. This created controversies. The issue was politicized. Criticisms were made that the BJP government is doing Hindutva politics. If the excavations proved that the Sangam era dated 800 BCE, there is an established fact that the civilization in the south was secular and modern. And the modernization occurred earlier than in other parts of India. The Sangam era had excellent trade connections with the world. The women’s literacy rate of the era was high and equal to men.
The criticism made: Hindutva politicians associated with the central government are not liking the fact that Tamil culture was older than thought before.
Current Affairs- February 10, 2023.
INDIA
- Union Rural Development and Panchayati Raj Minister Giriraj Singh inaugurates Mission Antyodaya Survey 2022-23
- National Security Advisor Ajit Doval called on Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow
- India’s national accreditation system ranked 5th in the world in the Global Quality Infrastructure Index (GQII) 2021.
- 14th Aero India event will be held in Bengaluru between 13th and 17th of February.
- Around 60 lakh cases are pending in High Courts across the country: Over 69 thousand cases are pending in the Supreme Court: Government Data
- External Affairs Ministry: Two lakh 25 thousand 620 people renounced Indian citizenship in 2022.
- 25 Addiction Treatment Facilities launched under Nasha Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan.
ECONOMY
- Pakistan signs deal with International Monetary Fund (IMF) over stalled bailout package.
- US Fed introduces Wall Street bank stress-test scenarios
- PM Modi to inaugurate three-day UP Global Investors Summit 2023
WORLD
- Australia to remove Chinese-made cameras from its offices over spying concerns
- Death toll surpasses 21,000 in massive earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria.
- North Korea unveils ‘record’ number of nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).
SPORTS
- The third edition of Khelo India Winter Games will begin at Gulmarg in Baramulla district of Jammu and Kashmir.
- ICC T-20 Women’s World Cup kick starts in South Africa.
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